Jay earned a Bachelor of Science from Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC Chapel Hill and a Master of Management from Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. At Wintergreen Hospitality, he aims to build a culture of people who are servant minded, engaged in their craft of delivering hospitable interactions, and love to innovate by challenging conventional wisdom. Profoundly visionary, Jay thinks with long-term patience, that's decades, not quarters.
You’re a Charlotte newcomer. What attracted you to Charlotte?
My family and I came for a business opportunity. We’ve been in North Carolina for many years as first-generation immigrants. Though we weren’t born in the state, my brother and I came here in kindergarten. My wife has been in North Carolina since second or third grade. We’re essentially natives and have grown up in different parts of the state, most recently the Durham-Chapel Hill area.
Coming to Charlotte felt like an opportunity to grow personally…to come into a new environment and test out our comfort zone, yet with enough familiarity. It’s not moving across continents like our parents and grandparents did before. This move felt accessible and palatable since it’s just down the road from the Triangle.
This has been an opportunity to learn and grow without being too intimidating. It also happened to overlap with the business opportunity were pursuing in the Belmont and Plaza-Midwood area of Charlotte.
What’s been your experience in Charlotte?
It’s hard to define it accurately or completely just yet. We’ve only been here a little over a year. There are so many dynamic things going on personally with us and our kids as a family that are a part of the adjustment of moving. It is hard to attribute just one thing to Charlotte.
That said, it has been enlightening in our self-discovery process in how we were able to participate in the community in the Triangle and how we’re approaching the same endeavor here. The make-up of this city is so different, culturally, socioeconomically and in many dimensions. Charlotte is enabling us to understand what it means to be part of a larger community when there’s so much more diversity.
Tell me about your business venture and work with Refuge.
We have been in the hotel business, or rather the real estate development business but primarily the hospitality business. The business of hospitality is actually customer service and a lodging business that happens to sit atop of a real estate business. My family has been in the real estate business for two generations now, 50-plus years. We have done it as franchisees of brands such as Hilton and Marriott.
With Refuge, we are attempting to launch our own hotel brand. We’re developing subject-matter expertise in the hotel industry to innovate and become more sustainable because the franchise model is becoming increasingly irrelevant and making it more difficult to thrive.
We want to create a brand where we can tell our own story. That’s the physical aesthetic and experiential programmatic elements, informed by our point of view, our heritage and who we are. We’re wrapping it all up into a brand that we hope the consumer of today will find relevant and interesting.
What’s your happy place and why?
I was talking about this recently with my wife Nimisha, who is one of the three co-founders along with my brother. We were talking about use of our brain and ability. In real estate there’s this concept of “highest and best use” of a piece of real estate and usually that means how do you make the most money out of that piece of land.
We started applying this to our brains, assessing the highest and best use of our brain and career. Is it entrepreneurship? Is it a certain industry? What is the passion that drives the work? For me, the happy place is when I’m activating my brain and my spirit in its highest and best use. I’m doing something purposeful. I’m adding value and contributing. I’m challenging myself to be at the top of my game while also having fun.
What inspires and motivates you?
If I take a more anthropological lens to it, it is simply how resilient the human species is. Looking around all day and every day, you see delightful things happening. You might call it a miracle. You might call it resilience or a story of overcoming struggle. There’s much of that happening all around us. That to me is really inspiring.
When I take that approach, it is helpful for me and my team to double down on human interactions because that’s really our business. You are not really paying us to sleep in the hotel or for a warm bed and hot shower. You are instead paying us for a feeling. It is a feeling of being taken care of, of other human beings being generous, kind, gracious and helpful.
Seeing the human spirit all around I am inspired. I find that rewarding.
